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ART IN ITS TIME Art writing normally contrasts art with “everyday life.” This book explores art as integral to the everyday life of modern society, providing materials to represent class and class conflict, to explore sex and sexuality, and to think about modern industry and economic relationships Art, as we know it, is not common to all forms of society but is peculiar to our own; what art is changes with people’s conceptions of the tasks of art, conceptions that are themselves a part of social history The history of society does not shape art from the outside, but includes the attempts of artists to find new ways of making art and thinking about it The essays in Art in Its Time offer a critical examination of the central categories of art theory and history They propose a mode of understanding grounded in concrete case studies of ideas and objects, exploring such topics as the gender content of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime and beautiful, the role of photography in the production of aesthetic “aura,” the limits of political art, and the paradox by which art, pursued for its own sake with no thought of commercial gain, can produce the highest-priced of all objects Employing an unusually wide range of historical sources and theoretical perspectives to understand the place of art in capitalist society, Art in Its Time shows a way out of many of the cul-de-sacs of recent art history and theory Paul Mattick is Professor of Philosophy at Adelphi University He is the author of Social Knowledge and editor of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art He is also editor of the International Journal of Political Economy and has written criticism for Arts, Art in America, and Artforum, among other publications i ART IN ITS TIME Theories and practices of modern aesthetics Paul Mattick First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003 © 2003 Paul Mattick All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Mattick, Paul, 1944– Art in its time: theories and practices of modern aesthetics/Paul Mattick p cm Includes bibliographical references and index Art and society Aesthetics, Modern I Title: Art in its time II Title N72.S6 M36 2003 700'.1'03—dc21 ISBN 0-203-41783-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-41931-6 (Adobe eReader Format) 01–415–23920–6 (hbk) 01–415–23921–4 (pbk) For Ilse Mattick with love and admiration and for three friends who should be remembered Serge Bricianer Louis Evrard Gherasim Luca CONTENT S List of illustrations Preface ix xi Introduction Some masks of modernism Art and money 24 Beautiful and sublime 46 The rationalization of art 74 Mechanical reproduction in the age of art 87 Pork and porcelain 106 The aesthetics of anti-aesthetics 119 The Andy Warhol of philosophy and the philosophy of Andy Warhol 134 10 The avant-garde in fashion 152 11 Classless taste 174 Index 183 vii ILLUSTRATIONS 2.1 Pablo Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon, June–July 1907, © 2003 The Estate of Pablo Picasso; ARS (Artists Rights Society), New York and DACS (Design and Artists Copyright Society), London Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY 2.2 André Derain, Bathers, 1907, © 2003 ARS, New York, ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY 2.3 Édouard Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergères (© Courtauld Institute Gallery, Somerset House, London) 4.1 Joseph Wright, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (© National Gallery, London) 4.2 Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827 Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY 9.1 Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, NY and DACS, London 2003 Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY 9.2 James Rosenquist, Marilyn II, 1962, © James Rosenquist/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2003 Image courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY 10.1 Cecil Beaton, “Jackson Pollock’s Abstractions,” Vogue, March 1, 1951, p 159, © Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Inc 10.2 Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1943, © Pollock–Krasner Foundation/ARS, New York and DACS, London 10.3 John Rowlings, “Uncluttered Sweater Look,” Vogue, January 1, 1945, p 46, © Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Inc ix 14 17 19 57 69 146 149 153 157 163 T H E AVA N T - G A R D E I N F A S H I O N wrong Avant-garde art, whatever the wishes of its makers and propagandists, became the official art of the dominant class, to such an extent that the concept of the avant-garde has not been able to maintain its original connotation of cultural negation.45 I not mean to express by pointing this out what Clark describes as the view “that any culture will use art as it sees fit, and that the very idea of art resisting such incorporation is pie in the sky.”46 This view involves a misconception fundamental to the ideology of art, a misconception fatal also to Clark’s more sophisticated view Art does not need to be “incorporated,” because it is not outside society to begin with; avant-garde production cannot be “used” in this sense by bourgeois society (as, say, African art could be) because it is a part of that society’s operations In identifying the idea that it is both subject to such utilization and strives to resist it in the formal nature of Pollock’s abstraction, Clark attributes to Pollock something like his own version of the ideology of art and of modernism in particular Given the centrality of the avant-garde idea for Pollock’s circle and for him personally, this is a more believable reading than, for instance, Thomas Crow’s claim that Beaton’s pictures reveal that the large-scale painting of Abstract Expressionism “would always carry the meaning of stage and backdrop” for the “courtly culture” of the art-loving American rich.47 However Peggy Guggenheim saw the painting Pollock made for her hallway, the image itself embodies the artist’s response to the opportunity to work on a large scale, transmuting the claim to public significance made by Mexican and North American muralists into the assertion that his own artistic powers could stand measurement against those of Picasso and Matisse Beaton’s photographs, Clark writes, are important because by subduing the challenge of the paintings “they raise the question of what possible uses Pollock’s work anticipated, what viewers and readers it expected, what spaces it was meant to inhabit, and, above all, the question of how such a structure of expectation entered into and informed the work itself, determining its idiom.”48 Though 45 Greenberg himself, considering the problem in 1967—in an article written for Vogue, no less— defined the avant-garde without reference to politics as “constituted by the highness of its [aesthetic] standards, which depend on distance from those of society at large” (“Where is the avant-garde?,” in idem, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol 4, Modernism With a Vengeance, 1951–1969, ed John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p 264 While he thought it was possible that “the avant-garde as an historical entity may be approaching its definite end,” Greenberg considered it likely that “the production of high art would be taken over by some other agency” (ibid., p 265) 46 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, p 363 47 Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p 48 I cite this view—despite the unconvincing character of an argument about “the origin of this kind of object” (p 47) that mentions neither 1930s muralism nor earlier modernist large-format painting, and that makes much of a myth about the cutting down of Mural to fit Peggy Guggenheim’s wall—because of its author’s distinction as a social historian of art 48 Ibid., p 176 Unfortunately, he pursues these questions only negatively, in terms of what he takes to be the pictures’ attempt at formal resistance to conventional reading 171 T H E AVA N T - G A R D E I N F A S H I O N Clark himself does not try to answer these questions, they are good ones To no more than sketch some answers: the large size of pictures like Autumn Rhythm suggests large intended spaces; given the visible effort to be more than wall decoration, the most likely ones, after the studio, are those of the art world: galleries and museums The “work against metaphor” Clark, like others, identifies as determining the paintings’ formal method indicates as expected viewers the normal inhabitants of those art-world spaces, no doubt in the first place other artists, who could be expected to come equipped with the habit of reading modern artworks metaphorically In addition, as works of art, and in particular as paintings on canvas, they anticipated or at any rate hoped for buyers In Beaton’s pictures, the Pollocks function neither as mural nor as easel paintings; visible only in part, they are subordinated as décor to the model and the dress Fifty years later, the paintings have long since triumphed culturally and economically over the fashions and the photographs The fame of these photos today is largely due to their connection with Pollock Even if fashion has now made it into museums, it lives, when not segregated in institutions of its own, in the basement or in period rooms, along with the other arts décoratifs The catalogue of a 1999 exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute devoted to “The Four Seasons” in dress featured a detail of Autumn Rhythm on its cover A Pollock retrospective would never have a Beaton up front Yet the illustrations for Vogue still irritate art historians and theorists For all the conventionality of their daring, these photographs can be as subversive of received ideas about art as Pollock’s work once was By bringing highpoints of both personal expression and formal exploration into collision with mondaine elegance they raise questions not only within but also about the discourse of art, and in particular about the intimate relations of art to the social environment from which, as “everyday life,” that discourse wishes to distance it For instance, they expose the interrelation between a conception of art linking masculinity with creative intensity and an idea of the feminine as the decorative embodiment of powers of consumption and display Most generally, they suggest the idea that the meanings of artworks are not given simply by the physical and visual nature of the works themselves but—to emphasize a commonplace—by the uses to which they can be put The paintings in which Pollock worked out his ideas about art in New York in the late 1940s, about his personal life experiences, and about the relation between the two in the practice of painting, provided others at the time with signifiers of fashionable excitement, sophistication, and privilege Today they provide Professor Clark with exemplars of the idea that political opposition to capitalist society can be located in cultural activity, if only imbued with the grandeur of inevitable failure Beaton’s use of them reminds us that the sense of failure depends on the claim to political grandeur After all, the idea that art—whatever the artist’s wishes—can “resist” the culture that produces it is as dubious as the hope that an economically underdeveloped country could have been the scene of a communist revolution in 1917 172 T H E AVA N T - G A R D E I N F A S H I O N One can easily object to social reality, and even imagine a different one But an individual person cannot resist society and live; the most militant revolutionary must obey the law of value regulating capitalist economic processes, must find money to pay the rent A painting, even if made in an effort to live and produce in a way at radical odds with modern society, lives on in the world in independence of its maker’s—or any particular viewer’s—intentions It was a dream of some early twentieth-century modernists that artists could change the world, a version of the fantasy, shared by producers and lovers of culture since the nineteenth century, that art could exist in independence of the dominant structures of social power Today artists by and large have given up such ambitions, though they may still wish to enact a kind of personal autonomy in their work hard to find in other social locations It is more likely to be critics, theorists, and historians of art who hold onto the idea of art’s transcendence and subversive power, for its reflection can give them a sense of their own wished-for independence and importance Discovering the limits of culture’s social force, however, need not be experienced as a nightmare; it can also be an awakening 173 11 CLASSLESS TASTE In memoriam Pierre Bourdieu, 1930–2002 The concept of taste developed in the course of the eighteenth century, together with the idea of aesthetic experience and, indeed, with what in the next century would become the modern idea of art Kant located taste in a mental faculty of aesthetic judgment, establishing the beauty (or sublimity) of some object of sense experience as a property of the human subject’s response to it Similarly, Hume took taste to be a matter of “the common sentiments of human nature” excited by objects of beauty Beside these philosophically canonical authors stand the writers of essays, pamphlets, poems, and treatises exploring taste as a human response to the worlds of nature and art What they all share is the idea that taste represents a natural response of human beings to sensory experience, providing a basis for judging degrees of beauty (or, as a more recent terminology has it, of quality) Although it has lost its preeminent place as a philosophical concept, taste remains an important category of everyday life, both to describe the range of human preferences and to serve as a standard for judging those preferences However universal the faculty of judgment may be, tastes notoriously differ Furthermore, difference—so class society operates—implies inequality, and to the ranking of objects corresponds a hierarchy of subjects, from the sensitive and knowledgeable connoisseur to the ill-informed vulgarian As Pierre Bourdieu puts it, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”1 Those with taste recognize others like themselves by their agreement on judgments of quality, or at least by disagreements within an accepted range of preferences In this way judgments of taste produce social classifications This is particularly true, Bourdieu argues, with respect to taste in art Since the capacity for a judgment of taste about a work of art requires knowledge of its place within the array of objects and performances making up the domain of art, and thus a familiarity with that domain, the capacity for aesthetic experience depends on certain formative experiences—having art in the Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) Henceforth cited in the text 174 C L A S S L E S S TA S T E home or being around artists; being encouraged in artistic activity at school; visiting museums and attending concerts, etc A simple example of familiarity with art is the presence of small art museums at elite universities in the United States, and their absence from lower-class schools Even if many students at Harvard, Mount Holyoke, or Berkeley never visit their campus collection, the fact that the collections are there to be visited corresponds to the high likelihood that students at those institutions will have grown up in households taking an acquaintance with art and its history for granted, just as that fact helps to maintain that likelihood Similarily, students attending museum-less Adelphi University, where I teach, are highly unlikely to have gone to an art museum (or classical-music concert) outside of school trips, which teach at once the social legitimacy of such institutions and their distance from the young person’s out-ofschool experience The social distinction manifested in taste is effected not so much on the plane of formal knowledge as on that of unconsciously formed and maintained habits of social and therefore physical interaction with art Passing the Fogg Museum on a walk across the Harvard campus reinforces the feeling that art is a natural part of the environment, which one may choose to attend to or not on a given occasion, that a student is likely to have derived from growing up with art in the home, on the walls and in adult conversation Such a student has acquired what Bourdieu calls the habitus of his or her class, the set of dispositions to act, in a range of social situations, in ways “appropriate” to a person of his or her sort It is habitus which generates a unified “lifestyle” involving such diverse practices as eating cheese after dinner, the adoption of certain styles of dress, ownership of books, the reading of particular magazines and not others, ownership of a country house or summer place, and having tastes in art In generating this style, habitus is embodied in what one might call micropractices of life—ease in wearing a suit or ordering food in a restaurant, for instance, along with ill-ease in other social circumstances, such as wandering into a working-class neighborhood In the concept of habitus Bourdieu has revived a concept from the seventeenthcentury origin of aesthetics, the idea of taste as an unconscious propensity (Pascal’s “second nature,” for instance) to make the right judgment and the right thing in response to the je ne sais quoi characterizing different situations Habitus creates a class identity in the form of a unified practice of classification, as choices are made Because these choices exist within a social space of different possible choices they necessarily have meaning as the rejection of different choices This is how taste classifies the classifier; because in a class society all distinction has status implications, Distinction does not necessarily imply [as in Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption], a quest for distinction All consumption and, more generally, all practice, is conspicuous, visible, whether or not it was performed in order to be seen hence, every practice is bound to function 175 C L A S S L E S S TA S T E as a distinctive sign and when the difference is recognized, legitimate and approved, as a sign of distinction (in all senses of the term).2 Distinction is, as noted, more than difference, in the realm of tastes and in that of the possessors of taste: “to the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers” (p 4).3 This hierarchy is complex and more accurately rendered as a space of positions defined by the different forms of power that structure social life If we look, for instance, at the subset of American art collectors buying modernist art in the 1950s we find, within a generally wealthy and educated group, wealthier and more socially established men collecting “bluechip” pictures by artists like Picasso and Matisse, and possessors of lesser and more recently acquired wealth, often women and people professionally close to the art world themselves, initiating the patronage of Abstract Expressionist artists, while sharing the estimation of the blue-chips as the artistic masters of the time.4 Meanwhile, for the majority of Americans, “Picasso” was a synonym for “far-out” rather than a maker of images actually enjoyed, and a mass-market publication like Life, operating in the space between upper- and lower-class taste, insisted on the inclusion of the French master in the artistic canon and hedged its bets on Pollock, both citing experts on his greatness and mocking him for his drips It would be wrong to say that in Bourdieu’s understanding taste reflects class; rather, taste is for him a constituent of class, a possession that helps to gives a person his or her social position My ability to wear the clothes appropriate for professional occasions (despite the slight trace of discomfort I experience when engaging in what the voguing masters of disguise featured in the film Paris is P Bourdieu, “Social space and the genesis of ‘classes’,” in idem, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p 237 As sociologist Alvin Toffler made this point in his celebratory book on arts consumption in the United States, written at around the same time as Bourdieu’s first systematic studies in the anthropology of culture, There are a finite number of automobiles for a consumer to choose from, a finite number of exotic meals that he can eat, and even a finite number of places to which he can, at the moment, travel Art, by contrast, is infinite in its variations and possibilities It is for this reason the broadest of all possible fields within which the individual can express his one-and-onlyness The Culture Consumers: Art and Affluence in America (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), p 63 The typically American substitution of individualism for the French theorist’s class analysis is contradicted by Toffler’s own description of his “culture consumers” as members of a particular income and lifestyle class, characterized by features quite similar to those identified by Bourdieu; see pp 39 ff See A Deirdre Robson, Prestige, Profit, and Pleasure: The Market for Modern Art in New York in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Garland, 1995), esp pp 135 ff 176 C L A S S L E S S TA S T E Burning call “academic realness”) is not of course sufficient to give me the powers that accompany my (sub)class position as a professor But, more than a mere sign of that position, these things demonstrate my acquisition of the habitus that that position requires because they are that habitus in action The practice of class taste is part of the process by which my classification as an academic is realized, that is, it is part of my occupying that class position This is evident as soon as we remember with Bourdieu that taste is “the propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices” (p 173): my ability to enjoy fine art, classical music, and rare wines, as well as my relation to the processes of social production, which makes the exercise of that ability possible, help define my membership in a particular fraction of what Bourdieu calls “the dominated fraction of the dominating class.” Art objects have specific properties, requiring particular elements of habitus for their adequate consumption As already mentioned, they function particularly well as social classifiers because, Bourdieu notes, they “enable the production of distinctions ad infinitum by playing on divisions and sub-divisions into genres, periods, styles, authors, etc.” (p 16) In addition, peculiar to the modern concept of art, in contradistinction to its historical relatives in other social orders, is the use to which the name “autonomy” has been given: as embodiment of the “higher” (noncommercial) interests of the dominant classes in society, providing opportunities for the cultivation of a capacity for perceptual experience independent of normal practical function This is what is signaled by the idea of the “aesthetic attitude” as one of detachment from the claims of “practical life.” According to Bourdieu, the aesthetic disposition, a generalized capacity to neutralize ordinary urgencies and to bracket off political ends, a durable inclination and aptitude for practice without a practical function, can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art (p 54) Thus, as Bourdieu describes it, it is not only that art is accessible primarily to those who have the wealth, leisure, and education to encounter and appreciate it Art itself, in its modern form, represents “the primacy of form over function,” of a “stylization of life,” of the detachment from the practical and the exercise of taste peculiar to the aesthetic attitude (p 176) In this it emblematizes the social position of the executive, as opposed to the operative: the decision-maker who looks for “results” without getting his or her hands dirty The love of art is an expression of the upper-class habitus in the cultural sphere; “the aesthetic disposition is one dimension of a distant, self-assured relation to the world and to others which presupposes objective assurance and distance” (p 56) 177 C L A S S L E S S TA S T E For this reason, Bourdieu objects to the idea of “popular art”: “The populist aestheticism which leads some to credit working-class people with a ‘popular aesthetic’ or a ‘popular culture’ performs a tacit universalization of the scholastic viewpoint which is not accompanied by the slightest intention of universalizing its conditions of possibility.”5 “Culture” in the modern sense is not just a historically specific concept, it is a class-specific one; to speak of “popular culture” is to treat those excluded from full access to that which “culture” primarily designates as if they were simply people with a different taste, one equally valid though unrepresented by any of the institutions charged with the collecting and display of art The working-class relationship to fine art, Bourdieu insists, does not just represent an alternative taste While the aesthetic attitude expresses a sense of freedom, adaptation to a dominated position “implies a form of acceptance of domination” (p 386) This has certainly been borne out by my experience of students from a regional working-class and lower-middle-class milieu When I send them, in connection with class work, to New York’s Museum of Modern Art—visited by most of them for the first time at my direction—they typically experience it as a foreign environment, whose contents they are mostly at a loss to understand They commonly describe both the artists and museum visitors who seem to understand and enjoy the works on display as either fools or fakers.6 The hostility expressed in this judgment suggests a defense, not just the registration of a difference—a defense against the alternate possibility that they are inadequate to the demands of what are evidently socially legitimated objects While they cannot understand how many of the things on view came to enter an art museum, it remains incontestable that it is an art museum and that those things are valuable and, however mysteriously, important Since taste is a relational system, the near abandonment of fine art to those with the appropriate habitus goes along with the confinement of the dominated to mass-marketed cultural goods that, whatever their quality, lack the character of rarity and luxury typifying the fine-art commodity And in the realm of nonart consumer goods, it is not only the desire for cheap versions of upper-class objects—imitation leather, designer underwear, posters of artworks—that signifies acceptance of the high social valuation of the real thing In addition, there is the construction of class-marked objects of conspicuous consumption—expensive sneakers, elaborate fingernails, dubious gold jewelry—that take the place occupied among the dominant classes by expensive and well-made clothing and accessories P Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, tr R Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p 75 Similarly, David Halle’s research into class taste in the New York City area showed that “the two main criticisms made by working-class people” are “that the artists are charlatans who cannot draw and cannot paint” and the related objection that abstract art “has no meaning” (D Halle, Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American Home (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp 121–5, 127) 178 C L A S S L E S S TA S T E It would be perverse not to read Bourdieu’s analysis of social being as an indictment of a system in which the freedom of some depends conceptually and practically on the unfreedom of others The indictment is a radical one—more radical, indeed, than the responses Bourdieu himself seemed able to imagine, forms of pressure on the political institutions of the very system whose working he criticized For example, he remarked in a dialogue with artist Hans Haacke that there are a certain number of conditions for the existence of a culture with a critical perspective that can only be assured by the state In short, we should expect (and even demand) from the state the instruments of freedom from economic and political powers—that is, from the state itself.7 The absurdity of this suggestion is evident Apart from the continual failure of schemes for “democratization of the arts” such as those advanced in the United States by well-meaning foundations and government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts, schemes which never succeed in expanding the arts audience much beyond a well-educated and relatively well-off minority, it is odd to find such a self-contradictory suggestion by a writer who has analyzed the functions of the “state nobility” within the apparatus of domination But Bourdieu’s own theory explains the limitations their social position places on the capacity of intellectuals to draw the furthest consequences of their own ideas Exercise of their power as the possessors of “cultural capital”—socially legitimated knowledge, degrees, institutional connections, mastery of certain jargons, etc yielding “a profit in distinction” (p 228)—requires their maintenance of belief both in the autonomy of their field of activity and in their unique fitness to exercise it Despite what one can fairly call Bourdieu’s heroic attempts to overcome the social blindspots inherent in his own social position, even he was unable to imagine a politics born outside of the existing political languages and institutions, in which a professional thinker like himself might play a relatively minor role—a politics ultimately centered not on the transformation of the state but on its abolition.8 It is hard today for anyone to imagine a politics capable of reorganizing present-day society on a sufficiently radical level to justice to Bourdieu’s indictment But it is not impossible, and the alternative, the unbounded continuation of the present order of exploitation, war, and ecological destruction, is both unlikely and frightful to contemplate If we make the effort to imagine a P Bourdieu and H Haacke, Free Exchange (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp 71–2 For a brief discussion of the limits of Bourdieu’s theory of class, see P Mattick, “Class, capital and crisis,” in Martha Campbell and Geert Reuten (eds), The Culmination of Capital: Essays on Volume III of Marx’s Capital (London: Palgrave, 2002), pp 31 ff 179 C L A S S L E S S TA S T E future renewal of revolutionary social movements, what effects might a radical social upheaval have on the nature of art and aesthetic experience? If we imagine a world in which the working class, the actual producers of social wealth, would take for themselves the power to regulate their activities of production and distribution, we imagine a society in which the assertion of control over economic goods would include the appropriation of cultural goods But such a social revolution would mean more than a redistribution of goods and privileges First of all, it would both make possible and necessitate a reorientation of production, to meet not only old needs but newly defined ones And it would involve a transformation of working-class habitus, utilizing for wider social purposes the principles activated in those areas of life, both at work and during leisure time, in which even today the dominated find resources for creativity and autonomous action It was in the framework of some such vision that Marx imagined the ultimate goal of socialism as the limitation of working hours to expand the time available for creative activity Without the need to support a parasitic ruling class and its apparatus of repression and mutual competition, and with a more rational allocation of productive resources and activities, the social working day would be shorter and, as a consequence, the time at society’s disposal for the free intellectual and social activity of the individual is greater, in proportion as work is more and more evenly divided among all the able-bodied members of society, and a particular social stratum is more and more deprived of the ability to shift the burden of labor from its own shoulders to those of another social stratum.9 With the abolition of commodity production, capital strictu sensu would lose its social significance: means of production would no longer also be the means of the exploitation of labor, and would therefore require reconceptualization under new schemas of property and social function Analogously, cultural capital would no longer function as a means for generating class distinction The meaning of taste would change fundamentally once the experience of actually altering society removed the appearance of naturalness from today’s cultural categories The role of education in reproducing and altering habitus could become an object of conscious attention, and with it public discussion and decision-making about what modes of perception and activity to foster and inhibit It is imaginable, perhaps even likely, that art would lose the special social value which today stems from its contrast with industrial production and consumption, and which enables it to function as an emblem of class superiority Interestingly, something like this change in social character is already happen- Karl Marx, Capital, vol 1, tr Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p 667 180 C L A S S L E S S TA S T E ing, as the boundaries between art and such lifestyle fields as cuisine and design, on the one hand, and commercial entertainment, on the other, are becoming increasingly permeable (a permeability exemplified by Damien Hirst’s expression, in a 2001 New Yorker interview, of indecision as to whether to put more energy into making art or into running restaurants) Under contemporary conditions, this decay of the distance between the aesthetic attitude and commercial practicality has taken the form of an apparent devaluation of culture, in the nineteenth-century sense, as such How would people look at the arts in a society in which the opportunities to make art and to enjoy it would be generalized and in which commerce would no longer exist? Would art, as a nineteenth-century thinker like Marx would no doubt have imagined, reassert its dignity as the exercise of “free activity”? Or should we expect something like a realization of the high-modernist utopia dreamed of by artists like Piet Mondrian and the Russian Constructivists, the dissolution of art into “everyday life”? As Czech architectural theorist Karel Teige expressed this idea in 1925, If today we still use and will continue to use the word art as an auxiliary term, it does not signify the sacred and exalted art with a capital A, the beautiful academic art, ars academica, les beaux arts that the modern era has unseated from its throne [I]t is a word that simply designates every artificial skill and proficiency In this sense we can talk about building art, industrial art, theater and film art, much in the same way that we can talk about the art of cooking, poetry, photography, the art of travel, or the art of the dance Art is simply a way of using certain means in a certain function.10 Interestingly, a page later Teige contradicted his rejection of a special status for art and artists by asserting that “Constructivists make no proposals for a new art, but rather they propose a plan for the new world, a program for new life.”11 Like Mondrian, even in forecasting the end of art Teige made the artist the hero of the story But while art was not, after all, “liquidated” by the realization of cultural imperatives embodied in modernist works, it seems also unlikely that it will lose the identity it has acquired through its history as an autonomous field, institutionalized in art schools, museums, and art history as an academic discipline and popular subject, represented by the multitude of books, musical compositions, paintings, and sculptures occupying cultural and physical space throughout the 10 K Teige, “Constructivism and the liquidation of ‘Art’,” in idem, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings, tr Irena Zantovská Murray and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000), pp 331–2 11 Ibid., p 333 181 C L A S S L E S S TA S T E world Alexander Dorner’s meditations on the fact that “our conception art is but a temporary fact in human history” offer a more plausible direction for speculation: “The present thus becomes a re-formation of the past; the elements of the past live on in it in a new and much more dynamic fashion.” This is a radical reformulation of Baudelaire’s definition of modernité as the appearance of the eternal in the ephemeral The “growth of the present,” in Dorner’s view, “contains no longer any eternal elements which may be conserved and, at best, rearranged.”12 The elements with which the future will have to work are those created in the past and re-created in the present Art has been and so far remains such an element of social reality Musing on the future of the arts “in a more rational, more sociable society” in 1957, Meyer Schapiro thought it likely that “in a socialist society the painter would cease to be a professional and would become an amateur like the lyric poets and the photographers.” At present, the artist lives, when successful, thanks to “an excessive valuation of his works that only a capitalist society can sustain.” Society in general cannot sustain artists “for the simple reason that only a few are good artists and every man today can be an artist.” This situation is related to another important trend Schapiro discerned: “the reduction of painting to a nonprofessional activity” ongoing since the nineteenth century, carried in the twentieth to a point where painting “requires no elaborate skill in drawing, no stock of conventional knowledge, but sensibility, feeling, and a strong impulse to creation.”13 Perhaps the philistine complaint about modern art— “But anyone can it!”—will appear as a virtue Perhaps only a few fanatics will give the time and effort necessary to create objects and performances responding to what they, under novel circumstances, will judge the great works of the past That in itself would be not so different from the situation at present Such thoughts admittedly take us beyond the point at which speculation can yield much of interest But it is still worthwhile thinking about the possibility of classless taste Imagining a different social world helps reveal aspects of our world we take for granted but need not It is important to remember that just as taste, aesthetic experience, and art as we know them came into existence at some time—and not so long ago—we can expect them to be transformed in fundamental ways if the political, economic, and ecological dangers we have created leave us enough time to grapple with the need to change our world 12 A Dorner, The Way beyond ‘Art’: The Work of Herbert Bayer (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), pp 15, 16 Teige is equally explicit: “There is no truth other than the occasional, ephemeral truth The basic feature of the modern spirit is skepticism against every dogma, every absolute validity, every eternal value” (“Constructivism,” p 333) 13 M Schapiro, “The future possibilities of the arts,” in Worldview in Painting: Art and Society: Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 1999), pp 192, 196 182 INDEX Adams, Abigail 48 Adorno, Theodor 5f, 87, 89 n 6, 103 n 61, 121, 127, 132 n 51, 150, 152 aesthetics 24, 39ff, 46f, 119ff; American Society for 119, 132f Alloway, Lawrence 121, 137 American Abstract Artists 156 Antiquity 10, 12, 22, 25, 40, 97, 110 Ardenne, Paul 132, 151 n 60 art: abstract 4, 123, 154ff; aspect of modernity 4, 11f, 24, 98, 108, 133; autonomy of 3, 21, 44f, 47, 54, 83, 94, 102, 106, 121f, 125, 132, 140, 161, 177, 181; contrast with everyday life 1f, 45, 110, 135, 137ff, 151, 169f, 172f; history 47, 100, 139f, 173; resists modernity 44, 117, 127, 149, 154; theory 125, 136, 150; see also fine art Ashton, Sir Leigh 163f aura 93ff, 97ff, 102f Baillie, John 62 Barrell, John 36 Barthélémy, Jean-Jacques 32ff Baudelaire, Charles 12f, 16, 18, 45, 75f, 101, 166ff Beaton, Cecil 152, 155, 165 n 32, 168, 171f beauty 43, 48ff Becq, Annie 50 Bell, Clive 120, 169 Benjamin, Walter 23, 87ff, 141f Benton, Thomas Hart 120, 155f, 161 Bourdieu, Pierre 25, 122f, 128 n 40, 129f, 165, 170, 174ff; concept of habitus 5, 175, 177 Buchloh, Benjamin 125f, 141 n 20, 148ff Burke, Edmund 48ff, 61f, 64f Cahn, Walter 97f Choate, Joseph C 116 Clark, T J 9, 152ff, 165, 169ff Cleland, John 48 n commerce: contrast with agricultural economy 31, 33f; effect on patriotism 29f Conceptualism 125f, 127 n 32, 128 Coplans, John 144ff Crone, Rainer 141ff Crow, Thomas 37 n 48, 127 n 32, 144ff, 171 Crown, Patricia 38 n 54 culture 12, 75; popular 178 Dahlhaus, Carl 71 Danto, Arthur 25, 120, 130 n 46, 134ff David, Jacques-Louis 62ff da Vinci, Leonardo 52f, 126 Davis, Natalie Zemon 60f Davis, Stuart 156 de Chassey, Eric 156 n 6, 162 n 23 decorativeness 159ff de Duve, Thierry 125 Degas, Edgar 168 Delacroix, Eugène 18, 68, 71 Derain, André 16f Dewey, John 120 Dickie, George 120f Diderot, Denis 27, 33f, 36 Diller, Burgoyne 160 n 15 DiMaggio, Paul 109 n 3, 111; and Michael Useem 114 n 17 division of labor 30, 32, 43 Dorner, Alexander 95f, 102, 120 n 3, 182 Duchamp, Marcel 120, 124f, 136, 157 Duncan, Carol 72; and Alan Wallach 96 n 33 183 INDEX Kosuth, Joseph 124f Kozloff, Max 129 Krauss, Rosalind 90ff Kristeller, P O 24, 47 Kruger, Barbara 129 Kubler, George 74 Eagleton, Terry Eberlein, K K 95f effeminacy 32, 38, 63 n 55 emulation 99, 164 fashion 164ff fine art: contrast with “agreeable” arts 41; with “mechanical” arts 36, 106; with “popular” art 39f, 111, 131 Foster, Hal 126f Fox, Daniel 109, 110 n freedom 4, 41ff, 75, 106f, 130, 179 Fried, Michael 123 Lambert, Susan 93, 97, 100 n 52 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) 76f, 78ff, 82, 160 Léger, Fernand 79 Lenin, V I 81, 85 n 37 Lessing, Gotthold 53ff, 99, 122 Levine, Sherrie 92 Le Witt, Sol 126, 131 n 49 Lichtenstein, Roy 138f Longinus 28 n 18, 62 luxury 28ff; and the arts 32ff Gautier, Théophile 75 genius 4, 47f, 53, 77, 98, 105, 106, 169 Gleizes, Albert: and Jean Metzinger 160 Goethe, J W von 70 Goodman, Nelson 7, 90f Graham, John 156 Greenberg, Clement 12, 24, 27 n 12, 41 n 63, 103 n 61, 121f, 126, 131, 152ff, 159, 168ff Gursky, Andreas 92 Guys, Constantin 168 Manet, Edouard 16, 18f, 168 Margolin, Victor 84f Marx, Karl 13, 15, 180 Masheck, Joseph 121 n Mercier, Sébastien 32 Minimalism 123, 139 Mitchell, W J T 59, 87 modernism 9ff, 71, 112f, 115, 117, 127, 143, 152ff, 181 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 121, 143 Mondrian, Piet 158, 160f, 163, 167, 181 Montesquieu, 29 Morris, Robert 123f Motherwell, Robert 119 Moulin, Raymonde 117 n 25, 123, 131 n 49, 132 n 50 Mozart, W A 65, 107 multiculturalism 114 Haacke, Hans 126, 130 n 44, 179 Halle, David 178 n Haskell, Francis 27, 99 n 44, 100 n 50; and Nicholas Penny 97 n 37, 99 n 45, n 47 Hegel, G W F 74, 78 Herbert, Robert L 62 n 55, 65 n 57 Higginson, Henry Lee 108, 110 Hirschman, A O 42 n 67 Hume, David 26, 29, 32 n 32, 174 Huxley, Aldous 158 National Endowment for the Arts 111ff, 117f New Deal 112, 115, 179 Newman, Barnett 71f, 119, 161 n 19 ideology 2ff, 25, 102; embodied in art works 4f Ingres J.-A.-D 15 interest and disinterest 42 Iverson, Margaret 128 Ivins, W M 98, 100 Oldenburg, Claes 136 Ozenfant, Amédée 76f, 79 Kant, Immanuel 41ff, 48 n 6, 54ff, 72, 74, 106, 126, 131, 174 Kelly, Joan 60 n 48 Kelly, Mary 128 Kennedy, John F 112, 147 kitsch 24, 103 n 61, 121 n 8, 131, 169 Klutsis, Gustav 81f painting: in Holland 35f, 38f, 57f; mural vs easel 157ff, 161f; and poetry 52ff; in Venice 35 Pears, Ian 38 n 55 Phillips, Christopher 87f Picasso, Pablo 13ff 184 INDEX play 41ff Pocock, J G A 28 n 16, 29f Poggioli, Renato 166 Pollock, Jackson 71, 120, 152ff Pomian, Kzrysztof 38 n 53, 39 Pope, Alexander 50 Popova, Liubov 82 postmodernism 23, 127, 133 primitivism 21f, 162 prostitution 15f Quatremère de Quincey, A C 102 Quesnay, F 31 Ratcliff, Carter 105 Rathbone, Perry 111 reading debate 39f, 131 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 27, 35f, 58, 63 n 55, 67 Robson, A Deirdre 165, 176 n Rodchenko, Aleksandr 81ff Romanticism 94, 101 Rosenberg, Harold 129 Rosenquist, James 148f Rothko, Mark: and Adolph Gottlieb 162 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 30ff, 51ff, 61, 63f Russian Revolution 82, 154, 172 Saisselin, Remy G 101 n 56, 103 Schapiro, Meyer n 11, n 13, 6, 7, 11, 77, 104, 119, 122, 162, 168, 182 Schiller, Friedrich 40, 43f, 70f, 72 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen 40 n 57 Simmel, Georg 164f Stepanova, Varvara 83 sublime 42f, 47ff Tarabukin, Nikolai 84 taste 109, 174ff Tatarkiewicz, Wladislaw 48 n Taylorism 77, 79f, 85 n 37 Teige, Karel 83 n 31, 181 Tillim, Sidney 89, 93, 116f Toffler, Alvin 113 n 15, n 16, 117, 161 n 22, 176 n Vasari, Giorgio 25ff Vesnin, Alexander 83 Vitruvius 46 Voltaire 28, 31 wage labor 41, 43 Wallach, Alan 108 Warhol, Andy 25, 86, 118, 120, 130f Weinstock, Clarence 156, 170 Williams, Raymond 4f, 9, 75 Winckelmann, J J 25f, 36, 40, 99 Wollstonecraft, Mary 65ff women: and social disorder 21, 32, 60f, 65 Worth, Charles Fréderic 167 Wright, Joseph 56f 185